Patrimonialism is one of Max Weber’s ideal types of political organization. It is a system of personal authority in which the ruler’s servants are the holders of office and the administration of the kingdom is an extension of the management of the ruler’s household. In medieval Muslim patrimonial states, Weber noted that the rulers’ armies consisted of Turkish military slaves (mamluks). In Weber’s view, this type of military force could be the source of chronic political instability, which made the Near East the classic location of nonlegitimate domination or what he called “sultanism.” Although Weber’s notion of sultanism as militarized, nonlegitimate domination can be misleading, his model of the patrimonial state fits the system of delegated authority as developed by the Abbasid caliphs and evolved with the emergence of independent Islamicate monarchies.
The Persianate polity, as it evolved under the Samanids in Khurasan and Central Asia (Transoxiana) in the ninth and tenth centuries, was divided into the dargāh, the household of the ruler or the court, and the dīwān, the bureaucracy, which consisted of several branches. The court was managed by the ruler’s representative or deputy (wakīl) and an observer (mushrif), whose duty was to be aware of all that went on in the dargāh and report on it. The most important group among “the men of the dargāh” was the corps of military slaves, one of whom was appointed the chief chamberlain (ḥājib-i buzurg), who controlled access to the king. The corps of military mamluks was created by Isma‘il b. Ahmad, the founder of the Samanid dynasty, and remained the most important element in its military organization. The same corps of Mamluks supplied the security force under a police chief or captain of the watch (ṣāḥib or amīr-i ḥaras), either a slave general or a noble freeman, for maintaining law and order in the cities. Just as in Weber’s ideal type, the policing of the cities was considered an extension of the duties of the guards who served at the court and protected the king. The Ghaznavid dynasty was founded by one of the Samanid Turkish mamluks. The Ghaznavids in the 11th and 12th centuries modeled it on that of the Samanids. The Ghaznavid patrimonial state was transplanted to India by the Ghurid military slave generals who founded the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century.
Meanwhile, another type of patrimonial regime developed with the formation of nomadic Turkic states in the 11th century—namely, the Qarakhanid kingdom in Central Asia and the Seljuq Empire in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia. According to this conception, the kingdom was the patrimonial property of the whole family of the khan, the tribal chief, and was divided into appanages upon his death. The problem of succession, however, resulted in the disintegration of the nomadic Seljuq Empire, as it did with the Timurid Empire in the 15th century. Marshall Hodgson rejected Weber’s ideal types of patrimonialism and, with better reasons, that of sultanism for these nomadic empires and offered two ideal types of his own in their place: the a‘yān-amīr system in the Seljuq period and the military patronage state of the post-Mongol era. The first describes the regime that emerged with the development of the iqṭā‘ system of land tenure in which large land grants were made to the military elite. In this system, social power of the notables (a‘yān) in towns and villages was subordinated to the domination of the military elite (amīrs) commanding the garrisons and using enormous landholdings for the maintenance of their tribal contingents. With the weakening of bureaucracy and decentralization of land assignments that resulted from the increase in the size of the iqṭā‘ and the amalgamation of fiscal revenue collection and prebendal grants for military and administrative service, the system developed in a military direction. Furthermore, the power of women in Turkic royal families, in interaction with the absence of primogeniture and indivisibility in nomadic kingdoms, laid the foundation for a novel political regime. The appanage of a young Seljuq prince was de facto governed by his tutor (atabeg), whom his widowed mother tended to marry. The a‘yān-amīr system thus changed into an extremely decentralized system in the latter part of the 12th and early 13th centuries.
Hodgson’s second ideal type for the post-Mongol period is the military-patronage state. It was modeled on the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria quite closely. The Mamluk amirs elected the sultan from their own ranks. As a consequence, the Mamluk kingdom was taken over as a whole by an elected sultan and never divided among the princes of the royal house as appanages. The Mamluk regime was strikingly similar to the Delhi Sultanate as an Islamicate polity under a complex system of collective rule by military slave-sultans. Given their relatively small number among the population, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria and their families developed an extensive network of patronage over civic and educational institutions through the civilian elite.
Despite his objection, however, Hodgson’s “military-patronage state” can be considered a subtype of the Islamicate patrimonial state. In applying his model to the Ilkhanid and Timurid Turco-Mongolian empires in the 14th and 15th centuries, Hodgson noted the character of Yasa as the law of the military estate, of which the civilian population took no cognizance. The nomadic tribal confederations that established these empires transformed themselves into permanent ruling castes after conquest and remained rigidly separate from the civilian population to which they cultivated the ties of patronage by holding courts and founding endowments. Holding enormous undifferentiated land grants (soyurghāl) that did not distinguish between fiscal and prebendal elements, they became the landlords of the peasant masses. The pattern of social stratification under the Turco-Mongolian empires differed significantly from that of the Persianate polity of the Samanids and the Ghaznavids. For this reason, according to Hodgson, it should be considered a separate subtype of Islamicate patrimonial state—in fact, the latest. The bureaucratic class, secretaries of the chanceries who were the bearers of the culture of ethics and statecraft, dealt with the civic society and institutions of the kingdoms and provided a picture of the social hierarchy and stratification in terms of status by arranging different modes of address appropriate for different ranks within the civilian population. A rigid dichotomy of the military estate (‘askarī) and the subjects (ri‘āya) divided society into a dominant Turco-Mongolian estate on the one hand and the nonmilitary Persian or Tajik estate on the other, comprising both the urban strata and the peasantry.
See also endowment; household; monarchy
Further Reading
S. A. Arjomand, “Evolution of the Persianate Polity and its Transmission to India,” Journal of Persianate Studies 2, no. 2 (2009); Idem, “The Law, Agency and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999); M.G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2, 1972; Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich, vol. 2, 1978.
SAÏD AMIR ARJOMAND